Written for Culture Wars
The passenger seat of a Skoda Fabia is an unlikely place to realise you’re in the same boat as Willy Loman. However, Andy Field’s dinky audio-piece reminds you that Battersea backstreets and Brooklyn backyards aren’t as different as we might like to think.
Loman and his like – the antiheroes of the American dream – are too easily watched as figures in fables, as mythical suckers, men that fell for sugar-coated horseshit. Motor Vehicle Sundown makes you realise that it’s not so much a fall, as something none of us can avoid or escape. It is a process of mental re-wiring that means our every idea about the world is coloured by implanted connotations. The world has tilted on its access; the simulations of ad-men have taken on a potent reality of their own.
It starts with the choice between driver or passenger; one role active and pioneering, the other passive and readily-led. In our ears, delivered through an MP3 player, comes a female flight-simulator of a voice, pointing us towards the car: a grey, mundane thing, clumpy and practical. A cardboard pine tree hangs from the rearview mirror, oozing a chemical-freshness through the cubicle. After the tone, we get into the back seat.
Field’s piece consists of nothing but words, sounds and – crucially – a tone of voice. It’s that bourbon-soaked, smooth American baritone; a George Clooney kind of voice, a Dean Martin unsung croon. Deeply paternal and soothing, it turns us to putty immediately.
In the back seat, we sit side by side, our heads perhaps leaning against the window. In your mind’s eye, you cannot but play back that generic movie, that all-purpose music video, in which a constant roadside landscape swishes by, partially reflected in the window-pane. You’re eight, the voice says. Mum and dad are in the front. You don’t know where you’re going. It doesn’t really matter. Your brother’s beside you. The family unit in the family car. You reach your hand out into the mid-ground of that middle seat, and your fingertips brush together.
For the second part, you’re in the front seat, adult now. Yet still the images conjured are glossy and cordial. They are of pretty, preppy girls and handsome, controlled men and convertibles. There are drive-in movies and roadside diners and white clouds on blue skies, all caught with that instagrammed jaded intensity. This is happiness, free and idealised. Open to anything. Yet, its all spun out of words, unembroidered and bland, that nonetheless trigger those ingrained associations of automobiles, transfused into personal experience; soldered on and pimped up.
It’s amazing how quickly they fade, though. Field’s writing switches track quite suddenly. The pitter of raindrops and the drawn-out squeal of windscreen-wipers snap you back to long, grey drives, heavy and irritable, down clogged British motorways. The rhythmic squeak-creak of plastic on glass forms a pulse in your head. Then, in the background, your ears attune to something familiar: live news commentary about planes and buildings and billowing smoke. The images come just as easily, just as vividly. That same instagram blue sky. The day the American Dream turned sour. These two layers somehow fuse together, both bleak and tragic and grim.
Afterwards, when I was returning the headphones, Field explained that the two tracks start in sync and diverge, until you’re hearing different things. Motor Vehicle Sundown (at least my experience of it; Maddy Costa’s seems slightly different) never confirms that switch, leaving you side by side in different headspaces, on separate tracks. However, there’s no way of knowing, especially as the whole track rather blends together, so the specific differences are unlikely to emerge in conversation afterwards.
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